Saturday, June 14, 2014

Has the Radio NZ reshuffle backfired?

(First published in The Dominion Post, June 13.)

I NOTICE someone has started
a “Keep Jim Mora in Afternoons” page
on Facebook. I wonder if this is the tiny tip of a rather large iceberg.

Mora, of course, was for
several years the popular host of Radio New Zealand’s Afternoons programme. In the recent reshuffle that followed the
arrival of a new chief executive, Paul Thompson, former Morning Report co-host Simon Mercep took over most of Mora’s show.

Mora still hosts The Panel,
the late-afternoon segment in which guests comment on the issues of the day, but it seems that
many RNZ listeners are pining over his absence from the rest of the show.

When I last checked, the Facebook
page had attracted 288 “likes” – hardly an earthquake, but my own unscientific soundings
suggest Mora is widely missed.

While Afternoons had grown tired and needed refreshing, its failings had
nothing to do with Mora, who was the consummate host for that style of
programme: witty, intelligent, empathetic and well-informed. Mercep, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be making much impact.

This raises wider questions
about what makes a good radio host. Mercep did an honest if unexciting job on Morning Report, but a news programme is
all about gathering information. It doesn’t depend on the host’s personality.

Afternoons, on
the other hand, is very much driven by the charm of the host. And since Mercep
took over, the show has lost its spark. I would be surprised if its
audience hadn’t shrunk. RadioLive, which has developed a strong roster
of hosts, will no doubt welcome deserters.

It’s reasonable to assume
that Mercep was moved into the Afternoons
slot because RNZ wanted to clear the decks for some fresh blood on Morning Report, its flagship programme.
But I suspect the move may have backfired in more ways than one.

RNZ appointed Guyon Espiner
and Susie Ferguson to replace Mercep and the sainted Geoff Robinson, presumably
with the aim of carrying Morning Report
into a new era.

But that created another
issue. While Espiner is an excellent print journalist (as he shows in occasional articles for The Listener) and did a good job as
political editor for TV One, radio is different.

In radio, the voice is
all-important. Especially at breakfast time, it must cut through the household
noise of boiling kettles, humming microwaves and running taps.

Ferguson’s voice has that
vital “listen to me” quality, but Espiner’s is soft and his diction woolly. As
a result, he’s not making the impact his bosses would have been hoping for. I
wonder whether they’ve given him any voice training.

On TV, Espiner’s voice wasn’t
an issue because it’s a visual medium. But radio is all about sound – a factor
possibly not fully appreciated by Thompson (who comes from a background in the
print media) when he approved Espiner’s appointment.

Mercep, too, is handicapped
by a soft voice. So I wonder whether not one, but two, mistakes have been made:
first in appointing Espiner to Morning
Report (and assuming that what had worked on TV would also work on radio), and consequentially in moving Mercep to Afternoons.No doubt RNZ’s
audience figures will tell us in due course.* * *

THE GREENS will have made few
friends in politics with their proposal to decriminalise abortion. It’s nearly
40 years since the abortion wars divided the country, but the wounds were deep
and most MPs would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie.

More to the point, the
Greens’ abortion policy represents a dogmatic ideological stance that is at
odds with their warm, fuzzy image and supposed concern for the weak and
vulnerable.

From a pragmatic perspective
as well as a moral one, it makes no sense. Abortion may technically still be a
criminal offence (a fact little understood by most people), but when was anyone
last prosecuted?

The truth is that any woman wanting
an abortion can procure one, as Christchurch abortion consultant Dr Pippa MacKay has pointed
out. The law is a sham: we have an abortion-on-request regime in everything but
name, which is not what Parliament intended when it changed the abortion laws in 1977.

So what are the Greens trying
to prove? Were the 14,745 abortions in 2012 not enough for them?

Green MP Jan Logie got one
thing at least partly right when she said abortion was a health issue. It’s a
health issue all right – not for women, for whom pregnancy is a natural and healthy state, but for the unborn whose lives are terminated.
* * *

IT’S HARD TO imagine anything
more worthy of being ignored than a hand-wringing statement by bishops and
university professors on the wickedness of alcohol.

Presumably the academics and
senior church figures who signed a recent plea for tougher measures to reduce
New Zealand’s supposed “heavy binge-drinking culture” missed the latest World
Health Organisation figures which show that our level of alcohol consumption is
moderate by world standards and our rate of “heavy episodic drinking” relatively
low.

On the other hand, perhaps
they’d rather not let the facts stand in the way of a good old moral panic.

2 comments:

Please please can we have Jim back on afternoons and get rid of Guyan and Susie on Morning report. Guyon does not come over well on Radio - he is a good reporter on TV but not Geoff Robinson, and Susie sounds like an attack terrior. Jess Mulligan has a good radio voice as well. I know RNZ is trying to appeal to the 20 35 yr old Auckland's but they don't listen to RNZ anyway - and those of us who do would prefer Jim andJesse. Thank you. Robin Elder Blenheim

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.